The Marus Manuscripts (12 page)

“They’re coming.”

“Who is?”

“The shepherd. He’s coming to—”

In another part of the building, there was a loud crash. Someone screamed.

“Wait here,” Sister Leona said. “Both of you. And lock this door behind me.” She rushed out of the room, closing the door behind her.

Dawn moved nervously to the door and locked it. More screams echoed through the halls, increasing in number and intensity. “Mercy!” Dawn whispered.

Anna crawled out of the bed. Her clothes were neatly folded on the bottom shelf of the bedside table. She grabbed them and dressed as quickly as she could.

Men’s voices intermingled with the screams. They came closer down the hall. Sister Leona shouted at someone, but her voice was suddenly silenced. Dawn began to cry as she backed away from the door. Anna threw the curtains aside. The window frame was small, but it looked as if she and Dawn could squeeze through.

“We have to get out of here,” Anna said.

“What’s happening?” Dawn cried. “What are they doing?”

“They’re going to kill us!” shouted Anna. The latch on the window stubbornly refused to move. It probably hadn’t been opened in years. The shouts and screams came closer and closer.

“Have mercy!” Dawn said again, her hand to her mouth. Someone was at the door. The handle moved up and down quickly. A man shouted.

Anna tugged at the window latch with all her might. It gave a little and then completely. She threw open the window just as someone began to beat against the door. The old wooden frame splintered, and the door handle broke loose.

“Hurry, Dawn!” Anna screamed.

Trancelike, Dawn drifted toward the door. Her hand reached out. “No,” she said softly.

The frame gave way to the blows of whoever was on the other side. A large man burst in, surveyed the room in a glance, and caught Dawn by the hair. He drew his sword back.

Instinctively, Anna grabbed the lamp on the bedside table and threw it at him. It crashed against his side, the fuel catching his sheepskin vest on fire. He yelled angrily and ran his sword into Dawn. She fell at his feet. The man staggered toward Anna, then swung out and caught her on the side of the head with his fist. She fell back against the wall. The man threw himself onto the bed, squirming and writhing to put out the flames. He had little success as the flames spread to other areas of his clothing, then onto the bed itself.

Anna scrambled for the window.

The man’s agonizing cries followed her as she fell from the window to a makeshift roof one story below. It gave way under her weight and she crashed through, landing on her side on a hay-covered dirt floor. A sharp pain shot through her hip and down her legs. Struggling to her feet, she half ran and half limped away from the convent and into the night.

W
ord came to Darien, then Kyle, about the massacre at the Dorr convent through one of Darien’s soldiers. The blame was placed on unknown marauders and vandals who killed the women, then set fire to the building. There were no witnesses to claim otherwise. General Liddell, who visited the scene of the destruction, promised a full investigation into the tragedy. “Justice will be served,” he proclaimed on the steps of the burned-out shell.

“Anna! What about Anna?” Kyle asked urgently.

“There were no survivors,” Darien replied, his hand held firmly on Kyle’s shoulder.

Kyle’s voice trembled. “No. I don’t believe it!” he insisted. “We didn’t come here for Anna to die! I have to see for myself!”

Darien signaled Colonel Oliver. “It’s only a couple of hours on horseback. Will you take him?” he asked.

Colonel Oliver nodded and went to saddle the horses. Kyle closed his eyes to fight back his tears.
What kind of world is this?
he asked himself.
The Unseen One wouldn’t allow Anna to die!

Dorr was crowded with soldiers from the royal army. Though the king and General Liddell had left, government officials and detectives remained to ask questions and make a good showing of sympathy to those who’d died. Grieving relatives arrived to identify their dead daughters who had joined the convent in high hopes of serving the Unseen One with their lives. In a way, Kyle thought, they had.

The stone walls of the convent stood tall, as if nothing had happened. But the wooden beams that held up the roof, the frames around the windows, and the large oak doors were all gone or turned into fallen black sticks of no distinction. Kyle’s heart sank as he looked at the charred ruins. The local police wouldn’t let them any closer than the gate. Phipps, the local magistrate, was keeping a tight seal on the area.

Colonel Oliver used his influence with a friend in the army to get a list of those who’d been found in the convent. He scanned it, then handed it over to Kyle. Breathlessly, Kyle ran his finger along the names of those who’d been claimed and the descriptions of those who hadn’t. None of them fit Anna.

“She’s not here,” Kyle said, afraid to hope.

“Are you sure?” Colonel Oliver asked.

Kyle tapped the list. “It says that all these girls were teenagers or older. Anna isn’t here!”

“I got the impression that she’s a very resourceful girl,” Colonel Oliver said. “Maybe she escaped.”

Kyle scanned the crowds nearby, the town, and the rolling green fields around them. Dark clouds were moving in. “Then where did she go?” he asked.

It began to rain.

The rain tapped like impatient fingers on the top of the old tin roof. Anna opened her eyes and immediately recoiled from the squalor of the place. A makeshift sink was filled with dishes and rotten food; a nearby rat sniffed at it with disdain. The walls and floor were made of loose-fitting boards that easily let weather, dust, and mud through. She thought she heard the buzzing of flies nearby. Looking down, she realized she was on a bed of straw.

She groaned as she reached for her aching head. It was bruised and tender to touch. Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, she winced. Her hip and legs also hurt. The pain worked through the fuzziness of her head, and she remembered what had happened at the convent. She stifled a cry, resolved to be strong, and instantly prayed to the Unseen One for the families of those who had died, for she knew without a doubt that everyone had—particularly Sister Leona and Dawn.

Only afterward did she realize how strange, yet natural, it was for her to pray at all.

“Hello there, little one,” a croaking old voice said.

Anna looked up. A shriveled old woman in a patched-up peasant dress and shawl walked in. She was hunched over as she carried a bucket and still hunched after she put it down next to the lopsided, wooden table. Her dirty gray hair dripped with rain but looked as if it might drip even in the sunshine.

“I wouldn’t get up too fast if I was ye,” the old woman said.

“Who are you?” Anna asked. “Where am I?”

“Ye’re in the house of Anastasia—
my
house,” the old woman said happily. “I lives near Wollet-in-Stone. Stumbling around in the dark, ye were. Thought ye were a beggar, I did. Nearly turned ye away, excepting I had a torch and saw yer eyes. Then I knew better. Better indeed. Ye walked miles.”

“What do
you
care about my eyes?”

The old woman named Anastasia poked a bony finger toward Anna’s face. “Two colors, ye have. One of the marks of the Unseen One. ‘She’s special,’ I said to myself and put ye to bed. Bad luck otherwise. I found foreign coins in yer pockets. They will serve as payment for my help.” She held out a quarter, a dime, and two nickels that Anna had been carrying.

Anna rubbed her eyes to be sure she wasn’t in another dream.

“Ye said much in yer sleep,” Anastasia went on. “Came from Sister Leona’s holy house, I reckoned. Sister Leona never liked me, but I’m sad that she was made dead. A tragedy, it was. I heared that the king himself wept over the news.”

Wept for joy,
Anna thought and bit her tongue to keep from saying it. “Why didn’t Sister Leona like you?” Anna asked instead. Her tongue felt numb, her speech slurred.

“Because I’m not like her, I’m not. I make a business that she don’t approve of.”

“What kind of business?”

The old woman laughed in a horselike manner. “Questions. So many questions ye have. The spirits of the departed is my trade. I speak to them and they visit me, they do.”

Anna then noticed an old, faded carnival poster hanging on the wall. “Anastasia the Mysterious,” it said in large, curly letters. Beneath it was a crudely rendered painting of a much younger Anastasia with her hair flowing and shimmering around a round face with magnetic eyes. Her hands were raised up as if she were conjuring something, her nails a bright blue. Anna shivered involuntarily. The rat at the sink eyed her for a moment as if it understood her feelings.

“It’s the rain, isn’t it? Ye’re cold,” Anastasia said. She walked to a rusted potbellied stove in the corner and stoked the tiny embers. They spat defiantly at her. “Warm ye up, this will.”

Anna tested her legs to stand, and, though it hurt, she was pleased that she could. “Thank you for your kindness, but I have to find my brother,” she said politely.

“Go? In this rain? Ye mustn’t,” Anastasia protested.

“But he’ll be worried about me,” Anna said, imagining how Kyle would react to the news about the convent. “He doesn’t know where I am.”

Anastasia sat down at the lopsided table and shuffled some cards. “Do ye know where he is?” she asked. “We can contact him without yer walks in the rain.”

Frowning, Anna asked, “How?”
Card tricks? A séance? Maybe a crystal ball?
she wondered.

“Call.”

“Call?” Anna asked, puzzled.

The old woman pointed to a box on the wall. It had thin, exposed wires running from the top and out through a hole in the wall. “Yes. It’s called a telephone, it is. Have ye not heard of it?”

Placing Anna’s call took some doing. First, an operator had to be called. That operator transferred Anna to another who handled inquiries about phone numbers. When Anna didn’t know Darien’s parents’ names or in what town they lived, that operator then connected her to the Ministry of Information in Sarum. The clerk there was less than helpful when he realized Anna wanted information about General Darien’s family. The palace had put a seal on any information related to General Darien. Anna tried to reason with the clerk. “It can’t be
that
big of a secret,” she said. Finally the clerk allowed that the general’s family lived several miles from a town called Leapford. That was as much as he would say before he hung up on her.

“I could have told ye that,” Anastasia said with a smirk on her face.

“Why didn’t you?” Anna said.

“Ye didn’t ask.”

Anna went back to the operator who handled inquiries about phone numbers and asked about Darien’s family’s phone number in Leapford. The operator said she would have to connect her to the
Leapford operator. Once that was done, the Leapford operator, who had been friends with Torbin and Evelyn for years, warily transferred Anna to what she called the “public line” for the house. A servant answered and promised to deliver Anna’s message to either Torbin or Evelyn, though he claimed not to know anything about Darien or his whereabouts.

Anna hung up, exhausted from all the effort.
It would’ve been easier if I’d walked,
she thought.

Three things happened as a result of Anna’s trip through the telephone maze. First, the servant told Torbin about the call from Anna. Torbin ventured out to the old house, where Darien and his men were making final preparations to leave for Gotthard. Darien dispatched Kyle and Colonel Oliver to go get Anna from the old woman’s shack near Wollet-in-Stone.

Second, Kyle got a crash course in horseback riding, having his own mount for the first time.

And third, the Leapford operator told her boss about the call. The boss, who was under strict orders to report any activity connected to Darien’s family, phoned the palace to tell them about the girl’s call. This news, combined with another report from the Ministry of Information, told General Liddell that Darien must be somewhere near his parents. Liddell passed the news on to King Lawrence.

Kyle hugged his sister without restraint or embarrassment there in front of the Wollet-in-Stone post office. It was the only building in the village. The rain had diminished to a light sprinkle.

“Ouch,” Anna groaned, her entire body now one big pain.

“I knew you weren’t dead,” he said in her ear. “The Unseen One wouldn’t let you die.”

Anna smiled at her brother’s affection and his conviction about the Unseen One. Somehow the two of them had gone from doubting His existence to faith that He was with them on this adventure.

“What happened to your eyes?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you some other time.”

Colonel Oliver, atop his horse, beckoned the two of them to hurry up. “General Darien is waiting for us,” he reminded them.

Kyle rubbed his aching legs. “Okay. You ride with me,” he told Anna.

“Not a chance,” Anna said and climbed onto Colonel Oliver’s horse.